


221 Brownstone

by rabidsamfan



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: 221B Ficlet, Gen, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-16
Updated: 2012-12-23
Packaged: 2017-11-21 07:11:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 1,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/594924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabidsamfan/pseuds/rabidsamfan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>221b ficlets for various characters, etc., as background to the beginning of the series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Humanity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cloudtrader](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cloudtrader/gifts).



> Beta thanks to CJ.

He's never really had the hang of it, this whole eating and sleeping (and pissing and fucking and Good God not even your nose can take care of itself without some kind of intermittent maintenance) routine. Left to his own devices, he'd as soon ignore the whole messy business, at least while there's something interesting to think about. But there isn't always, and then the urges echo more brightly up his spine, insisting that he do something, _anything_ , **now** to quiet them. The tattoos had worked for a while. The needle pressing in, prick after prick, sharp and clean, again and again, leaving an ache for the chemistry of his brain to answer. And when he'd gone to find out what the addicts knew, to learn the details that would solve the puzzle at his fingertips, another needle had seemed like nothing more than that. One tiny prick to gain their trust, that's all. How was he to know that the drug would give him the silence he had never known? He was lost from the very first dose. He hadn't thought it possible, beyond the paralysis of sleep, to lie so untroubled beneath the wheel of stars. Who could have warned him that the insistent urges of his body would be nothing compared to the irresistible cravings of his brain?


	2. Homeless

She keeps her things in a cheap storage warehouse in Queens, one that is near a subway stop so she can visit it whenever her life requires her to unearth some useful relic of her past. There’s a bookshelf with her books on it there, and the dismantled bedframe. (She got rid of the mattress and the bedding because her nose kept insisting that they smelled like Liam months after Liam had become a reason for insomnia instead of dreaming.) She’s kept her dresser too, and the bamboo chair that has followed her from place to place ever since it graced her room in college. But it doesn’t come with her, not while she lives in clients’ houses, or in the sterile perfection of residential hotels. It’s better this way. Safer. Her wardrobe fits into a suitcase, and the rest fits into the corners. A space in a cupboard, a shelf in the refrigerator, a place for her towel and her shampoo in the bathroom – it’s enough to go on with. As long as she can go out to run in the mornings she has time to think, and as long as her clients are focused on themselves (and they are always focused on themselves) no one will ever ask why her why her life – and her bedroom walls – are barren.


	3. History

He's smart, and honest, and determined – with luck he'll make a damned good cop, his supervisors had agreed years ago, back when he still spent every morning doublechecking his uniform to make sure that every button, every pin, every thread was in its proper place. It hangs in his closet now, still perfect, and undisturbed except for funerals and parades and the odd bar mitzvah. (It is New York, after all.) But deep in the left hand pocket he knows, even if no one else does, that there lies a single silver shilling, the young Victoria nearly unrecognizable after a century of passing from one hand to another. It is a memento of sleeping between damp sheets and looking the wrong way before crossing streets, of the fish and chips he’d expected and the chicken tikka masala that had taken him by surprise. It is a memento of a chase through a city impressively old and surprisingly new, and of the arrogant young genius who had led the dance through a labyrinth of clues. It is a trophy of a murderer caught, the scourge of two continents brought to ruin by a new world flatfoot and an old world aristocrat. It is a gift, given at their parting, while his plane hummed impatiently beyond the gate. Something to remember London by.


	4. Heir

He can recall being proud of the child, of the bright haired boy with the quicksilver mind, even when delivering paternal rebukes in the wake of one impolitic announcement or another. But the observations which had been precociously cute and easy to dismiss in the four year old were disastrously accurate and all too clearly explained by the seven year old, no matter how prestigious the guest, and there’d been nothing for it but to find a school somewhere safely away from politicians and business partners, a place where a boy who absorbed knowledge like a sponge, who had quickly learned everything but a sense of discretion, might still discover when it was best to bite his tongue. The first school had been a disaster, ending in broken bones. The second, not much better. But the boy had settled at the third, much to everyone’s relief, skinning past his contemporaries in class after class, and going on to university still too young to shave above once or twice a week. For one incandescent summer it seemed that the boy might make something useful of himself, but that had been before the addiction to crime, and addictions to worse, had intervened. Still, he knows he has to take responsibility for his son. The family honor demands it. Pride is thicker than blood.


	5. Habitation

Even stones and plaster and wood can take on memories, if the years are long enough, and the narrow house on the quiet street has stood for a century and more. In the quiet reaches of the night it still echoes with the laughter of a young bride and her groom, the chattering of children in the nursery, the murmur of guests in the parlor, and most of all the glorious music of the grand piano that had to be brought in (and taken away) through the windows. What else but memories could explain the way that the house still listens for the patterns of the feet that waltzed whenever they had company, but faltered and slowed and stumbled when solitary; the emptiness filling the house until only music and the memories remained. The life of the place has quickened thrice since silence fell, with different voices, different footfalls, but never genius nor music, and the house has judged each new round of tenants and found them wanting. But houses are not meant to be unoccupied. They are meant for the clutter of furniture and books, for the give and take of conversations, for the scents of cooking in the kitchen and the soft sounds of sleep in the bedrooms. 

And if a genius comes to stay, that’s all the better.


	6. Hazard

She's lost patients before. Every surgeon does. It's a reality that goes with the job title, and one she'd learned to live with before she'd finished her first rotation as an intern. People die, and doctors who can't live with that reality don't stay doctors very long. But always before this she's lost patients for reasons that made sense. Known complications. Hidden conditions. Errors – not always visible except in hindsight. Things you could point to and say, “this is what went wrong.” And in one sense she knows what went wrong this time too, knows that she froze, unseeing, while the lifeblood drained out of the incision she'd just made. Knows that too many seconds passed before the nurse realized that she wasn't hearing the warnings from the anesthetist, that she wasn't conscious of the way her hands had curled into frightened fists. Knows that she was blind, deaf, numb to the clean white walls and the bright steel lights, blind to everything but the memory of a different operating theater, far from the ordinary dangers of New York. Knows she'd been standing once more five scant seconds from disaster, with the wind of the Afghan winter bellying in the walls of the tent marked _Médecins Sans Frontières_ and the snow seeping in through the flaps to settle on her boots.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It has been a very long time since I wrote in a fandom with a canon that was changing week by week, so for the sake of Yuletide deadlines, I have resorted to writing about what happens prior to the pilot, but I hope to add more chapters eventually to this, addressing what has actually been shown on the series. And since this chapter hasn't been _specifically_ jossed yet, I've left it in for your amusement.


End file.
